SlashGear

Round three in the Amazon/Macmillan ebook price war, and the online retailer are now seemingly attempting to play the consumer-fairness card.  Having pulled Macmillan’s catalog late last week after the publisher demanded a new “agency” pricing scheme for electronic content, and seen Macmillan threaten “extensive and deep windowing of titles” if they didn’t agree, a new Amazon statement now confirms Amazon’s eventual intent “to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles”.  Still, Amazon describes $14.99 bestsellers as “needlessly high”, and suggests other publishers may not choose to follow suit.

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The iPad-prompted Amazon/publisher fallout continues, with John Sargent – CEO of Macmillan, whose books and ebooks promptly disappeared from Amazon’s store in the aftermath of the Apple tablet announcement – confirming that the online retailer modified their catalog in response to a demand to renegotiate pricing structures.  In a post on the PublishersMarket blog (and a paid advert that ran this weekend in the print magazine), Sargent explains that he put his new pricing structure – which would see ebooks sold with flexible pricing, and retailers taking a set 30-percent commission – to Amazon the day after the iPad’s launch, only to find that in apparent retaliation they swiftly pulled all print and electronic copies from the store before the CEO even had time to get back to his New York office.

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